Au Bois, a free adaptation of Charles Perrault's tale Little Red Riding Hood, depicts an urban universe where two women – mother and daughter – must cross a wood to go to the girl's grandmother's house.
The text, published in 2014 by Claudine Galea (associate artist at the Théâtre National de Strasbourg), was awarded the same year by the Collydram Prize, a national prize for dramatic literature awarded by middle school students. He is brought to the stage by Benoît Bradel, director of the Breton company Zabraka and accustomed to subsidized stages (he worked for a long time at the MC93 alongside Jean-François Peyret). Zabraka is interested in the hybridization of genres and seeks to "rub words and gestures, backgrounds and forms, in search of inventions and languages", as the company indicates on its website.
In Au Bois, actors Raoul Fernandez, Emilie Incerti Formentini, Emmanuelle Lafon, Seb Martel and Séphora Pondi share the stage for a show eminently addressed to women. It is a show where "women are no longer told", to use the formula present in the synopsis. Claudine Galea, starting from the observation that "younger and younger girls have to fight against boys and men", gives us a text where the two female characters at the heart of the plot "are no longer prey".
An essential place is given to the two central characters. The mother is above all a woman who assumes her body, her sexuality and her fantasies. It seeks pleasure through the immediate consumption of (industrial) food, beverages and mass entertainment. Wood represents for her a place of exoticism where she would like to lose herself, she is so disconnected from the realities of sexual assault that she would like it to happen to her. The girl, on the other hand, is a teenager in search of exits and freedom. Both, by their references and aspirations, seem to belong to the intellectual petty bourgeoisie.
The other central character of the story is wood. It is both the main location of the action – the set represents a kindergarten in a wood – and a character endowed with speech (played by the actress Emmanuelle Lafon). Dressed in a material similar to that of the décor, it is through it that the viewer receives the story. He is a kind of narrator, alter ego of director, both external to the story and completely impregnated by it. He makes the connection with the audience by breaking the fourth wall. In the same way, the character of the RumeurPublic, depicted on video by other actors, recalls the ancient chorus present in Greek tragedies to comment on the action and influence the reaction of the public. He is here the one who feeds on gossip and what will be said, the one who is eager for various facts. This interactive vision showing, on the one hand, the characters of the story and, on the other hand, the narrator and the choir, testifies to a desire of the author (and perhaps also of the director) to address a message to the public, a moral.
The moral is to be wary of appearances. The wolf (the bad guy, the antagonist) is not always who we think and sometimes hunters (supposed good) are worse than wolves. If wolves represent unpopular boys, bad boys in English, hunters are the metaphor for nice, helpful and devoted boys. But "wolves were good for his grandmother / Times have changed," the text says. Today's girls are no longer looking for bad boys, they prefer "neighborhood boys", the supposedly good guys. Supposed, because in the version of Galea / Bradel, it is the "nice" hunter who is the antagonist, the rapist. The wolf we were so suspicious of is ultimately only the object of a fantasy : this is why we must be wary of appearances. But who should we be wary of? Of all men? Only "good" ones? Can we really classify men in this way? The moral is simplistic and too obvious. From the first minutes, we know that the outcome of the show will be the rape of the girl by the hunter, we expect it, if only by the few allusions that are made to the film The Night of the Hunter by Charles Laughton. The show does not make the connection with any concrete problem, neither wage inequality, nor battered women, nor homeless women who are subjected to regular violence, nor men and women who suffer police repression (therefore from the "good guys") during demonstrations. It is a show about the bourgeoisie addressed to the right-thinking bourgeoisie in search of exoticism: the one that knows neither violence nor abuse. So morality is unlikely to really pass the ramp.
There remains a possible reading grid: in the tales, do we not already imagine the end when reading? And isn't morality simplified either? Perhaps it would be more relevant to approach Benoît Bradel's work from an aesthetic point of view. Since the show plays with the codes of the fairy tale to divert them (nursery rhymes for example), to make fun of them, to reappropriate them, since the lights give the creation a poetic rendering accentuated by the music, we can see you simply a pictorial work. But is it enough to make theater?
The show is to be discovered at the Théâtre National de la Colline in Paris until May 19, 2018.
